Many entities extend credit (i.e., credit issuers) to consumers, for example, credit card companies, utilities, banks and other financial service companies for a wide variety of purposes, including first and second mortgages, general consumer credit, home improvement loans, student loans, home equity, automobile purchase loans and the like. When consumers default on such loans, credit issuers are often faced with either trying to collect the debt or charging it off. Businesses have arisen whose primary purpose is to purchase such defaulted debts from the credit issuers and taking over the collection of the debt through legally compliant debt collection practices. These companies are known as debt buyers.
Debt buyers often incur significant pursuit costs to collect on the debt. While there are various known debt collection approaches, one particularly effective, albeit up to today costly, approach involves collecting such debts judicially. The typical judicial model involves filing claims (i.e., to collect on the defaulted debt) in state courts across the United States. However, this approach involves significant costs, due to the fact that each state/court has its own unique set of filing requirements, forms, preferences and the like that make it difficult and highly inefficient for all entities involved, particularly high volume debt buyers (and their legal counsel). Simply stated, document flow in the above scenario is inefficient.
It is known to electronically file a manually prepared legal document in an electronic format, such as in an Adobe Acrobat portable document format (pdf). For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2007/0055532 entitled COURT ELECTRONIC FILING SYSTEM to Jneid disclose a system and method for electronically filing a court paper; however, the system with which the user interacts is limited to attaching documents, exhibits and the like that have already been prepared. This approach, while perhaps providing a minor improvement over manual preparation of legal documents followed by physical transport and filing of paper legal documents with the court, does not address the end-to-end inefficiency described above (i.e., from a defaulted loan or the like through the judicial filing of a claim).
More sophisticated approaches have been developed, for example, as seen by reference to a suite of LegalXML standards, now in version 4.0, defining standards for legal data exchange. For example, an Electronic Court Filing (ECF) 4.0 portion of LegalXML allows one to standardize integration methods in e-filing implementations using XML (extensible markup language) and thus provides some direction as to authoring and filing of electronic documents with a court. While this development represents an improvement compared to electronically filing portable document format (pdf) files, the end-to-end inefficiencies referred to above remain.
There is therefore a need for a system and method for legal documents authoring and electronic filing that minimizes and/or eliminates one or more of the problems set forth above.